The emirate's 1.2 million residents could have lost more than Dh268.46 million in potential business due to the power blackout and disruption in telecom services.

Dubai blackout
This would have happened if the outage had continued for the full day.

Dubai's gross domestic product reached Dh97.98 billion last year, which averages Dh268.46 million per day. This translates to a Dh11.18 million hourly loss in Dubai's gross domestic product.

Business activities came to a standstill yesterday from 9:45am when telecommunications and utilities - the two most essential services - went off in Dubai leaving businessmen and residents in limbo.

Mohammad Amin, regional manager, EMC Middle East, said, "Today's power outage in Dubai vividly highlights the need for organisations from every sector including telecommunications, banking, energy and government to have in place a viable business continuity strategy that is regularly tested for occasions such as these.

"We anticipate a significant increase in demand for business continuity solutions following the outage as awareness for this business need has been considerably increased."

Power restoration began progressively from 12pm onwards and full restoration did not take place until evening, in some places as late as 5pm.

This is the second time such an occurrence has taken place in four years. In 2001, a failure in one of the power stations in Jebel Ali disrupted electricity and water supply in the city.

A worker rests at a Deira shop waiting for power to return.
This time, according to Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa), "A sudden failure in one of the main transmission sub-stations at Jebel Ali Power Station caused the power failure in the city."

Dubai has an installed power generation capacity of 3,833 MW of which 2,660 MW is generated through gas turbine and the rest generated through the steam turbine.

Dubai's peak load reached 3,228 MW in August last year, while total power consumption went up to 16,395 GWh (Giga watt per hour), up from 14,795 GWh in 2003.

This is expected to go up significantly this year due to the ongoing development in the city.

Dewa has a customer base of 281,353, of which 186,240 or 65 per cent are residential customers. There are 88,632 commercial customers that make up 32 per cent of its customer base.

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